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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ken Kesey

Part II

Part IV

Summary

After breaking the glass at the Nurses’ Station, McMurphy
is back to his old troublemaking ways. Even Doctor Spivey begins
to assert himself with the nurse. The aides put a piece of cardboard
where McMurphy broke the glass, and Ratched continues to sit behind
it as if it were transparent—she looks like “a picture turned to
the wall.” Ratched rejects McMurphy’s petition for an Accompanied Pass,
which is a permission to spend time outside the ward while attended
by another person. McMurphy wants to leave the ward with a prostitute
he knows from Portland, Candy Starr. As a result of Ratched’s denial,
McMurphy shatters the replacement glass pane, claiming he did not
know it had been replaced. Bromden notes that the nurse shows signs
that her patience is starting to wear down. When the glass is replaced
again, Scanlon accidentally smashes it with a basketball, which
she then throws away.

Doctor Spivey grants McMurphy’s request for a pass to
take a fishing trip with nine other patients, accompanied by two
of his aunts. Men begin to sign up for the trip, each paying McMurphy
ten dollars for the boat rental. Meanwhile, Ratched pins newspaper clippings
about rough weather and wrecked boats on the bulletin board. Bromden
wants to sign the list, but he is afraid to blow his deaf-and-dumb
cover, realizing that he has to “keep acting deaf if [he] wanted
to hear at all.” He remembers that when he was ten, three people
came to his home to talk to his father about buying the tribe’s
land. When Bromden spoke to them, they acted like he had not said
a word. This memory represents the first time in a long time that
he has remembered something about his childhood.

Geever, an aide, wakes Bromden and McMurphy in the middle
of the night when he scrapes off the wads of gum under Bromden’s
bed. He tells McMurphy that he has tried for a long time to find
out where Bromden, as an indigent patient, could obtain gum. After
he leaves the dorm, McMurphy gives Bromden some Juicy Fruit, and Bromden,
before he can think of what he is doing, thanks him. McMurphy tells
him that when he was a boy, he took a job picking beans. The adults
ignored him, so McMurphy silently listened to their malicious gossip
all summer. At the end of the season, he told everyone what the
others said in their absence, creating havoc. Bromden replies that
he is too little to do something bold like that.

McMurphy offers to make Bromden big again with his special body-building
course. He offers to pay Bromden’s share of the fishing trip fee
if he promises to get strong enough to lift the control panel in
the tub room. He tells Bromden that the aunts who will accompany
them are in reality two prostitutes. When McMurphy notices Bromden’s
erection, he states that Bromden is getting bigger already. Right
then, McMurphy adds Bromden’s name to the list. The next day he
persuades George Sorenson, a former fisherman, to take the last
slot.

When Candy arrives at the hospital—without Sandy—the
men are transfixed by her beauty and femininity. Ratched threatens
to cancel the trip because all the patients cannot fit into Candy’s
car, and they do not have a second driver. In doing so, she discovers
that McMurphy lied about the cost of the rental to make a profit
off the other patients. She tries to use this information as part
of her typical divide-and-conquer strategy, but the other patients
do not seem to mind. McMurphy then persuades Doctor Spivey to come
with them and drive the second car. When they stop for gas, the
attendant tries to take advantage of them. McMurphy gets out of
the car and warns him that they are a bunch of crazy, psychopathic
murderers. The other patients, seeing that their illness could actually
be a source of power for them, lose their nervousness and follow
his lead in using their insanity to intimidate the attendant.

Bromden marvels at the changes the Combine has wrought
on the Outside—the thousands of mechanized commuters and houses and
children. When they get to the docks, the captain of the boat does
not allow them to take the trip, because he does not have a signed
waiver exonerating him should any accidents occur. Meanwhile, the
men on the dock harass Candy, and the patients are ashamed that
they are too afraid to stand up for her. To distract the captain
of the boat, McMurphy gives him a phone number to call. When the
captain goes to call, McMurphy herds the patients onto the boat.
They are already out to sea by the time the captain realizes the
number belongs to a brothel.

While on the boat, everyone catches large fish and gets
drunk. When they return to the dock, the captain is waiting with
some policemen. The doctor threatens to inform the authorities that
the captain did not provide enough life jackets, so the policemen
leave without arresting anyone. After a short fistfight, McMurphy
and the captain have a drink together. The men on the dock are friendly
with the patients when they see their impressive catches and after
they learn that George is a retired fisherman. Billy is infatuated
with Candy; when McMurphy notices this, he arranges a date for them
at two in the morning two weeks later, on a Saturday night.

Everyone is in high spirits when they return to the ward,
but McMurphy seems pale and exhausted. They had taken a detour to pass
by an old, run-down house where McMurphy lived as a child. Caught
in a tree branch was an old rag, a remnant from the first time he
had sex, as a ten-year-old with a girl who was perhaps even younger
than he. She gave him her dress to keep as a reminder, and he threw
it out the window, where it caught in a tree branch and remained
to this day. Bromden remembers seeing his face reflected in the
windshield afterward and remarks how it looked “dreadfully tired
and strained and frantic, like there was not enough
time left for something he had to do.”

Analysis

McMurphy’s rebellion grows more overt as the patients begin to defy
Ratched on their own terms. McMurphy still maintains a somewhat
humorous edge to his resistance, as his request for an Accompanied
Pass demonstrates. By asking to be let out for a day to consort
with a prostitute, McMurphy both asserts his sexuality and reminds
Ratched that she has failed to emotionally castrate him. By gaining
Spivey’s approval for the fishing trip, McMurphy demonstrates to
Ratched that he does not deem her the highest authority on the ward.
Nurse Ratched can only resist his growing influence by trying in
vain to frighten the other patients with the newspaper clippings,
which fail to suppress them and their newfound individual thinking.

Meanwhile, Bromden begins to attain greater self-knowledge through
McMurphy’s influence. He remembers the racist government agents
coming to his house, and he realizes the origin of his sense of
inadequacy and invisibility. Bromden feels himself becoming stronger
as he talks to McMurphy and slowly becomes a man in his own eyes.
McMurphy’s offer of Juicy Fruit to Bromden illustrates the value
of good relationships between the patients, and Bromden’s decision
to speak demonstrates the extent to which goodwill has helped to
heal his wounds.

In contrast, Geever’s discovery of Bromden’s gum is a
reminder that the hospital continues to function like a totalitarian
state. The patients are still subject to strict supervision and
the invasion of their privacy. Once faced with the conniving Geever,
Bromden knows that McMurphy will keep his most precious secret:
that he is not deaf and dumb. McMurphy’s own childhood experience
of playing mute shows that the two of them are more similar than
they might appear.

McMurphy’s own program of therapy for the other patients involves
reviving their faith in their sexuality. He notes, jokingly, that
Bromden’s erection is proof that he is getting bigger already. McMurphy
presents the patients with a woman who can reawaken their repressed
sex drives; the pretty Candy Starr, unlike Nurse Ratched, exudes
sexuality. McMurphy seems to recognize that the patients, Billy
in particular, can become individual, powerful men only if they
can experience sexual feelings without the sense of shame that Ratched
and the rest of the ward seem to inculcate.

During the trip, two unpleasant experiences threaten
the therapeutic value of the outing but ultimately lead to the greatest
individual development for the patients. First, when the gas station attendant
disrespects them, McMurphy rescues them by showing how their stigmatized
identity as mental patients can be used to their advantage. Instead
of being made to feel afraid, they can now intimidate others by
exaggerating their insanity. McMurphy, in effect, teaches them how
to cope with the outside world in a different way, to reject the
previously unsuccessful approach of conformity. However, the patients
still depend heavily on McMurphy to lead them. When they arrive
at the docks,they are too timid to answer the insults of the seamen
by themselves.

The second experience that initially seems detrimental,
but is actually beneficial, occurs when McMurphy tests the patients
by refusing to help them once they are out to sea. Like Christ taking
his twelve disciples to the sea, he forces them to fend for themselves, and
they find, to their surprise, that they do not actually need his help.
They begin to see themselves as men, not as feeble mental patients.
When they return to the docks, they realize that they not only have
proven something to themselves, but they have proven something to
the seamen with their impressive catches. In turn, the seamen act
politely and respectfully, in remarkable contrast to their earlier
rudeness.

Yet, while the mental state of each patient is improving immensely,
the strain of responsibility for curing the patients of their society-generated
insecurities has clearly begun to wear McMurphy down. McMurphy’s
exhaustion seems to stem from something other than the trip alone,
and Bromden’s description of his expression in the car foreshadows
McMurphy’s eventual submission. Significantly, this expression occurs
in conjunction with McMurphy’s childhood memory of being sexually
dominated by a woman. Despite all of the fervor and individuality
that McMurphy conveys, he also has experienced a distortion of his
male sexuality due to a woman’s dominance. In his increasing strain,
we see that the strength which makes McMurphy so well equipped to
combat the mechanistic society of Nurse Ratched—his humanity—is
also a weakness that may ultimately lead to his total exhaustion.

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